OnDeck
- 🦄Became a unicorn2014
- 📈Peak valuation$1.3 Billion ’14
- 💔Became a Unitard2016
- 💸Last valuation~$117M
How it happened
OnDeck was a pioneer of online small-business lending, using data and algorithms to underwrite loans to merchants traditional banks overlooked, and its December 2014 IPO valued it around $1.3B with shares quickly trading above $20. Credit losses, funding-cost pressures and skepticism about its model ground the stock down for years, and the pandemic's hit to small businesses was the final blow. In 2020 consumer-lender Enova acquired OnDeck for about $1.89 a share — roughly $90-122M, a fraction of its IPO value. Long-tenured employees on Glassdoor marked the Enova deal as a turning point, describing how the culture shifted afterward from a growth-focused tech company to a leaner, metrics-driven lender.
Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.
Source: Enova / Crowdfund Insider / SEC (Dec 2014 IPO valuing it ~$1.3B, shares traded above $20; Enova acquisition $1.89/share ~$90-122M, completed Oct 2020)
